Max Oehler

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Max Oehler (born December 29, 1875 in Blessenbach im Taunus , † March 7, 1946 in Weimar ) was a German officer and archivist. After the death of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in 1935, Friedrich Nietzsche's cousin took over the management of the Nietzsche archive in Weimar.

family

Max Oehler was the second of six children - including Richard Oehler - of the Protestant pastor Oskar Ulrich Oehler (1838–1901) and his wife Auguste, née Forst (1847–1920). Oskar Ulrich Oehler was a brother of Franziska Nietzsche, the wife of Carl Ludwig Nietzsche and mother Friedrich and Elisabeth Nietzsche.

Life

Until 1919: career in the military

Oehler attended the prestigious Schulpforta boarding school from 1889 to 1895 and, after graduating from high school, decided to pursue a career as an officer, although he also had an affinity for literature and music. Since 1899 he exchanged letters with Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and repeatedly expressed the idea of ​​working at the Nietzsche Archives in the near or distant future, but he primarily pursued his military career. He was stationed in Deutsch-Eylau for a long time as a member of the Teutonic Order Infantry Regiment No. 152 ( 41st Division ) . Oehler admired the values ​​of the Prussian military, what he particularly liked about Nietzsche was his supposedly warlike and militaristic remarks. In 1906, Oehler had an illegitimate child from an affair who stayed with his mother.

In 1908 he was given leave of absence from April 1 to December 31, 1908 at his own request, in order to be able to work in the archive for the first time. In the summer he traveled as Förster-Nietzsche's messenger to Stockholm to the banker and patron Ernest Thiel , with whose support the Nietzsche Archive Foundation was soon established. At that time he fathered a child with Thiel's wife Signe, possibly with the knowledge of Ernest Thiel, who recognized the son as his. Towards the end of his leave of absence, Oehler became a member of the board of the newly established Nietzsche Archive Foundation, to which he was to belong until 1945.

Also in 1908 he published a book on the history of the Teutonic Knight Order , now with the rank of first lieutenant . In 1909 his request for exemption from the military for the purpose of further work on the Nietzsche Archives was rejected. In 1910 he had his first book on the same topic, The War between the Teutonic Order and Poland-Lithuania 1409–1411, followed, and in 1912 a second volume on the history of the Teutonic Knight Order was published . In the meantime he had the prospect of becoming a brigade adjutant in the army.

On March 6, 1911, he married the then 18-year-old Annemarie Lemelson (* 1893). The couple had several children, including Ursula Sigismund . In 1912 he was a captain and company commander in Marienburg .

In the First World War he took part in the Battle of Tannenberg . Due to severe pain in his sciatica , which accompanied him all his life and made further combat missions impossible, he was soon taken to the Marienburg fortress hospital , where he became the fortress commander and intelligence officer. In May 1915 he was sent to Berlin as a railway officer. Even during the war he managed to visit the Nietzsche archive several times and to forge plans for the future with Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in which he, his brother, the librarian, Dr. Richard Oehler or both should work in the archive. In 1917 he came to the railway department of the War Ministry as a general staff officer. Until shortly before the end of the war, he firmly believed in a German victory. Even after the defeat of the German Reich and the November Revolution, he initially remained in the ministry and tried with other officers to regain power from the soldiers' councils he despised .

After 1919: In the Nietzsche archive

In 1919 he reached an agreement with Förster-Nietzsche and retired from the military with the rank of major in order to start working at the archive on April 1st. He lived with his family first in Bad Berka , then in Weimar.

Max, his brother Richard and their cousin Adalbert Oehler and their common cousin Förster-Nietzsche formed the actual management team of the Nietzsche archive. They were all united not only by their admiration for Nietzsche as they saw him, but also by their rejection of the Weimar Republic . He was absolutely obedient to his much older and childless cousin; his family became hers, in a way.

In 1922 he reappeared as a journalist by publishing the commemorative publication Den Manen Friedrich Nietzsche on Förster-Nietzsche's 75th birthday , which brought together the essays of many important admirers of Nietzsche and Förster-Nietzsche. As an archivist, he was doing most of the practical work in the archive. Apparently, however, not even he had access to the documents which, as it later turned out, were used by Förster-Nietzsche for forgeries.

Like Förster-Nietzsche, he admired the Italian fascist leader Mussolini and established the archive's links with fascism. In 1925 he published Mussolini and Nietzsche. A contribution to the ethics of fascism . In the 1920s he and his wife were a member of Hermann Graf Keyserling's "School of Wisdom" .

On December 1, 1931, he joined the NSDAP , together with the Jena legal philosopher Carl August Emge , who headed the “Scientific Committee” of the archive.

After Förster-Nietzsche's death in 1935, Max Oehler became head of the archive. He continued the connection to the National Socialist state and went even further than that. In the archive he organized tours for school classes, students, soldiers and visitors from home and abroad. What he thought of Förster-Nietzsche's forgeries that became known in the archive is not known. In any case, in lectures and articles on Nietzsche, he disseminated an image of Nietzsche that was acceptable to National Socialist ideology; A successful publication from 1937 in which he refuted the thesis advocated by Nietzsche and his sister that the Nietzsches were descended from Poland - which was probably correct, but was also very much in keeping with the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche.

After US troops marched into Weimar in 1945, Oehler tried to defend the archive “against accusations of reaction”. In a seven-page memorandum “A Brief Outline of the History and Activities of the Nietzsche Archive” he presented the archive as an independent institution in the service of free research. He formulated similarly in a letter from October 1945: Anyone who knows the archive would

know that the Nietzsche Archive never paid homage to reactionary or any other political tendencies, or even represented and propagated them publicly, but dedicated itself entirely to its limited scientific tasks .

Both under US and Soviet occupation, he initially achieved that the archive was not used as accommodation for soldiers. However, the Soviet military administration soon blocked the archives' accounts, which then had to stop all work.

death

In December 1945, Oehler is said to have been picked up for interrogation by a Russian interpreter. The now 70-year-old disappeared afterwards. Allegedly, he was sentenced to forced labor in Siberia, locked in a cellar not far from the archive and died in March 1946 as a result of imprisonment. In fact, Oehler was imprisoned in Weimar on December 5, 1945 and sentenced to death on February 21, 1946 together with Günther Lutz by a Soviet military tribunal for war crimes. On March 7, 1946, Oehler and Lutz were executed by shooting.

Notes and sources

  1. ↑ Wollkopf, p. 240.
  2. ^ According to Krummel, p. 629, Oehler's essay was printed with slight changes between August 1937 and February 1938 in eight different newspapers.
  3. ↑ The memorandum is located in the Goethe and Schiller archive of the Weimar Classics Foundation and Art Collections: GSA 72/2628.
  4. ↑ See: On the underground effects of dynamite. From dealing with Nietzsche's books to dealing with Nietzsche's books; Edited by Michael Knoche, Justus H. Ulbricht, Jürgen Weber; Wiesbaden 2006, p. 7 ISBN 3-447-05308-9 Online
  5. ↑ Krummel, pp. 872f.
  6. ↑ Andreas Weigelt, Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner (all ed.): Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944-1947): A historical-biographical study. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015, pp. 497f., ISBN 9783647369686

Works

literature

  • Richard Frank Krummel: Nietzsche and the German Spirit , Volume 3.
  • Ursula Sigismund (ed.): Thinking in conflict. The Nietzsche archive in personal reports 1897–1945. With an introduction by Dietrich Wachler and unpublished articles by Max Oehler, Münster / Hamburg / London, Lit, 2001, ISBN 3-8258-4865-5 . (The editor is Oehler's daughter, born in 1912.)
  • Ursula Sigismund: Zarathustra's clan. Munich, Ehrenwirth, 1977, ISBN 3-431-01884-X .
  • Roswitha Wollkopf: The committees of the Nietzsche archive and their relationship to fascism up to 1933 in: Hahn, Karl-Heinz (Ed.): In the run-up to literature: the value of archival tradition for understanding literature and its history . Böhlau, Weimar 1991, ISBN 3-7400-0122-4 , pp. 227-241.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Oehler, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer and archivist
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Blessenbach in the Taunus
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1946
Place of death Weimar